• What determines the type of sedimentary basin that occurs in a region?
• What are the various types of fossil preservation?
• Most individual organisms that have lived on earth during the long history of earth did not become fossils. Why? Also, what increases the chances of fossil preservation?
• How is the Archean different from the Proterozoic and the modern Earth?
• Which has the better fossil record, marine invertebrates or terrestrial vertebrates? Why?
• Why did life on earth remain virtually unchanged for over a billion years?
• Why was having a shell an important innovation for Cambrian life?
• How can you distinguish a brachiopod from a bivalve, and a gastropod from a cephalopod?
• How can a single trilobite produce multiple fossils?
• What is a fossil?
• What is the difference between an index fossil and a facies fossil?
• At what type of plate boundary do very large mountains form?
• What drives plate motion?
• What is the “Big Bang” and what is the evidence for it?
• What is the nebular disk hypothesis and what is the evidence for it?
• Why is the earth layered?
• Were there any “leftovers” in the solar system following the accretion of the sun and planets? What might they be? Have they had any impact on earth history?
• How is Earth different from the other inner Planets?
• How is it that we know so much about the Interior of the Earth?
• Why does the earth have a magnetic field?
• Is the earth currently heating up, cooling off, or stable?
• Where did the atmosphere come from, and why is the composition so different now as compared to when it formed?
• Heat flow was very much higher in the Archean than it is today. What was plate tectonics like?
• How did continental crust form during the Archean?
• Why do geologists know so little about the Precambrian even though it spans the first 4 billion years of Earth history?
• When and how did North America form?
• When did the first supercontinent form, and why did it eventually break apart?
• When and why did the first mountain building event along the eastern part of North America take place?
• Why did the abundance of stromatolites decline so rapidly after the Proterozoic?
• How is the Paleozoic Fauna different from the Cambrian Fauna?
• What did the Midcontinent Rift region become in the early Paleozoic?
• When did the first continental glaciation take place?
• What is a “BIF”?
• How can you tell if something is living?
• How did the early Earth meet the requirements for the formation of the “stuff” of life?
• What were the earliest organisms on earth and in what types of environments did they live?
• How did eukaryotes evolve from prokaryotes?
• What triggered the diversification of life, after life had remained unchanged on earth for over 1 billion years?
• What is a Sloss Sequence?
• Why are intervals of Cambrian and Early Ordovician sediments thicker near the edges of the North American continent, but thin in the interior?
• When does the Sauk Sequence begin and end?
• Where was North America during the Cambrian and Early Ordovician?
• Why did the Taconic Orogeny take place?
• Why did continental glaciation take place near the end of the Ordovician?
• Why did a mass extinction occur near the end of the Ordovician?
• How is the Paleozoic Fauna different from the Cambrian Fauna?
• What happened to many marine invertebrate groups after fish greatly diversified in the Middle Paleozoic?
• What are some of the differences in life on earth during the Middle Paleozoic as compared to the Early Paleozoic?
• When do mature “sheet” sandstones occur within the Sauk and Tippecanoe sequences?
• When do foreland basins form?
• When do the major glacial events occur in the Paleozoic?
• Why do evaporates form in the upper Midwest during the Silurian?
• Why was the colonization of land by plants a very significant event in Earth history, and what did plants have to overcome to accomplish this?
• How was the Acadian Orogeny different from the Taconic Orogeny?

• How do late Paleozoic cyclothems form and what do they represent?
• What are the three mountain building events that resulted in the Appalachians and how are they different?
• When was Pangea fully formed, and what was happening on earth at this time?
• How and why was plant life different during the Permian and compared to the Pennsylvanian?
• What innovations made it possible for amphibians to live on land?
• What innovation makes reptiles less dependent on water than the amphibians?
• How is the end Permian mass extinction different from other Phanerozoic mass extinctions?
• Why did Pangea break apart, and what did the breakup do to the western part of North America?
• How and why is the Mesozoic marine fauna so different from the Paleozoic marine fauna?

e-mail me leonardk@mnstate.edu if you have any problems